Lahore, Pakistan:- Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani on Tuesday extended service of Director General Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), Lieutenant General Shuja Pasha, for one year. Summary in this regard was sent to the Prime Minister 15 days ago which was accepted.

Pasha was scheduled to retire from service on March 18, 2010.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asserted that the Sept 11 attacks on US World Trade Centre and Pentagon a ‘big lie’ which was used by the US as an excuse for the war on terror.

Ahmadinejad, while addressing the Intelligence Ministry staff, said “September 11 was a big lie and a pretext for the war on terror and a prelude to invading Afghanistan,” calling the attacks a “complicated intelligence scenario and act.” Ahmadinejad also questioned US claims that the death toll reached 3,000 saying that the Americans never published the names of those who died.

Back in 2007, New York officials have rejected the Iran leader’s request to visit the World Trade Center during his NY visit for a UN meeting.

The CIA and its Pakistani counterpart, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, have a long and often tormented relationship. And even now, they are moving warily toward conflicting goals, with each maneuvering to protect its influence after the shooting stops in Afghanistan, reported New York Times.
Yet interviews in recent days show how they are working together on tactical operations, and how far the CIA has extended its extraordinary secret war beyond the mountainous tribal belt and deep into Pakistan’s sprawling cities.
Beyond the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, CIA operatives working with the ISI have carried out dozens of raids throughout Pakistan over the past year, working from bases in the cities of Quetta, Peshawar and elsewhere, according to Pakistani security officials.
The raids often come after electronic intercepts by American spy satellites, or tips from Pakistani informants — and the spies from the two countries then sometimes drive in the same car to pick up their quarry. Sometimes the teams go on lengthy reconnaissance missions, with the ISI operatives packing sunscreen and neon glow sticks that allow them to identify their positions at night.
The drone attack on Mehsud is part of a joint war against militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where CIA drones pound militants from the air as Pakistani troops fight them on the ground. Even as the ISI breaks up a number of Taliban cells, officials in Islamabad, Washington and Kabul hint that the ISI’s goal seems to be to weaken the Taliban just enough to bring them to the negotiating table, but leaving them strong enough to represent Pakistani interests in a future Afghan government. Besides Mullah Baradar, several Taliban shadow governors and other senior leaders have been arrested inside Pakistan in recent weeks.

Barack Obama Vows To Defeat Al-Qaeda, An angry President Barack Obama on Tuesday warned “potentially disastrous” US intelligence failures over a Christmas Day airliner attack were deeper than first thought, and demanded immediate action.
“It is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged,” Obama said in a terse televised statement after meeting US spy chiefs and top national security aides at the White House. “That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it.” Obama said two probes into the botched plot to blow up a Northwest plane showed US intelligence missed other “red flags” as well as the already revealed fact that the top suspect was an extremist who had traveled to Yemen.
He said US intelligence knew that Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula wanted to strike not only US targets in Yemen but in the United States itself. “The bottom line is this — the US Government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack, but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots,” Obama said. “In other words, this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had. “When a suspected terrorist is able to board a plane with explosives on Christmas Day, the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way,” Obama said, after meeting top spy chiefs and government agency heads.
“It’s my responsibility to find out why, and to correct that failure so that we can prevent such attacks in the future,” Obama said.
Obama also said he was suspending the transfer of Guantanamo detainees from Yemen. The Christmas attack has raised concerns about Yemen, because the Nigerian man has claimed to have been acting on instructions from al-Qaida operatives in that country. Nearly half of the 198 detainees held at Guantanamo are from Yemen. But Obama reiterated his vow to eventually close the prison camp in Cuba. As for the prison for terror suspects in Cuba, he said, “Make no mistake, we will close Guantanamo prison,” Obama said. Guantanamo, he said, “was an explicit rationale for the formation of al-Qaida” operating in Yemen.

Danish Police Arrest Man Trying to kill Cartoonist: Danish police said that they shot and wounded a Somali man with al Qaeda links when he tried to break into the home of a cartoonist whose 2005 caricatures of Prophet Mohammad outraged many Muslims.
The 28 year old man, armed with a knife and axe, failed to get into Kurt Westergaard’s home in the town of Aarhus and was shot in the leg and hand after he threw the axe at a policeman, a police spokesman said. The man, who was now under arrest, had “close ties to the Somali terror organisation al-Shabaab as well as to al-Qaeda leaders in East Africa,” the Danish Security and Intelligence Service PET said in a statement. According to Danish media reports, there were 3 attackers involved in the incident. Westergaard was not hurt in the incident, a police spokesman told. In February 2006, as Muslims reacted against the caricutrues, Danish ambassies in Damiscuss and Beirut were also destroyed and set ablaze; where as many people were also killed during protests in Nigeria, Libiya and Pakistan.

WASHINGTON: Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has alleged Pakistan of using terrorism as state policy adding that the intelligence inputs suggesting Pakistan- based terrorists are plotting more attacks like strikes in Mumbai.

In interview to a US newspaper Singh said Pakistan was not sincere in the war against terrorism.

He said Pakistan and United States have different interests in Afghanistan. He advised the United States to quit Afghanistan soon and urge Pakistan to crush Taliban.

The Indian prime minister alleged Pakistan of using terrorism as state policy and only act against militants when they challenge the writ of Pakistan military.

New Delhi: Mirwaiz Free to Travel Wherever he Wants: S M Krishna,  On the issue of grant of visa to Mirwaiz Umar Farooq to visit China, Minister of External Affairs S M Krishna on Friday said he was free to travel anywhere he wanted.

“He is free to travel wherever he wants,” Krishna told reporters outside Parliament House. He said the Ministry of External Affairs encouraged such visits whether these were to “Pakistan or China”.

The Mirwaiz will be visiting China as a guest of an NGO and will give a lecture there.

When asked if India was considering extradition of 26/11 accused David Coleman Headley, Tahawwur Hussain Rana and some of the accused based in Pakistan, Krishna said, “Investigations are still on. We are awaiting the report of the investigation.”

He said once the report was submitted, the government would take appropriate steps.

Senior staff members of the UN nuclear agency have concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired “sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable” atom bomb.

The report by experts in the International Atomic Energy Agency stresses in its introduction that its conclusions are tentative and subject to further confirmation of the evidence, which it says came from intelligence agencies and its own investigations.

But the report’s conclusions, described by senior European officials, go well beyond the public positions taken by several governments, including the United States.

Two years ago, US intelligence agencies published a detailed report concluding that Tehran halted its efforts to design a nuclear weapon in 2003. But in recent months, Britain has joined France, Germany and Israel in disputing that conclusion, saying the work has been resumed.

A senior US official said last week that the United States was re-evaluating its 2007 conclusions.

The atomic agency’s report also presents evidence that beyond improving upon bomb-making information gathered from rogue nuclear experts around the world, Iran has done extensive research and testing on how to fashion the components of a weapon. It does not say how far that work has progressed.

The report, titled “Possible Military Dimensions of Iran’s Nuclear Program,” was produced in consultation with a range of nuclear weapons experts inside and outside the agency. It draws a picture of a complex program, run by Iran’s Ministry of Defense, “aimed at the development of a nuclear payload to be delivered using the Shahab 3 missile system,” Iran’s medium-range missile, which can strike the Middle East and parts of Europe. The program, according to the report, apparently began in early 2002.

If Iran is designing a warhead, that would represent only part of the complex process of making nuclear arms. Engineering studies would have to turn ideas into hardware. Finally, the hardest part would be enriching the uranium that could be used as nuclear fuel – though experts say Iran has already mastered that task.

While the analysis represents the judgment of the nuclear agency’s senior staff, a struggle has erupted in recent months over whether to make it public. The dispute pits the agency’s departing director, Mohamed ElBaradei, against his own staff and against foreign governments eager to intensify pressure on Iran.

ElBaradei has long been reluctant to adopt a confrontational strategy with Iran, an approach he considers counterproductive. Responding to calls for the report’s release, he has raised doubts about its completeness and reliability.

Last month, the agency issued an unusual statement cautioning it “has no concrete proof” that Iran ever sought to make nuclear arms, much less to perfect a warhead. On Saturday in India, ElBaradei was quoted as saying that “a major question” about the authenticity of the evidence kept his agency from “making any judgment at all” on whether Iran had ever sought to design a nuclear warhead.

Even so, the emerging sense in the intelligence world that Iran has solved the major nuclear design problems poses a new diplomatic challenge for President Barack Obama and his allies as they confront Iran.

US officials say that in the direct negotiations with Iran that began last week, it will be vital to get the country to open all of its suspected sites to international inspectors. That is a long list, topped by the underground nuclear enrichment center under construction near Qum, that was revealed 10 days ago.

Iran has acknowledged that the underground facility is intended as a nuclear enrichment center, but says the fuel it makes will be used solely to produce nuclear power and medical isotopes. It was kept heavily protected, Iranian officials said, to ward off potential attacks.

Iran said last week that it would allow inspectors to visit the site this month. In the past three years, amid mounting evidence of a possible military dimension to its nuclear program, Iran has denied the agency wide access to installations, documents and personnel.

In recent weeks, there have been leaks about the internal report, perhaps intended to press ElBaradei into releasing it.

The report’s existence has been rumoured for months, and On Friday, more detailed excerpts appeared on the Web site of the Institute for Science and International Security, run by David Albright, a nuclear expert. In recent interviews, a senior European official familiar with the contents of the full report described it to The New York Times. He confirmed that Albright’s excerpts were authentic. The excerpts were drawn from a 67-page version of the report written earlier this year and since revised and lengthened, the official said; its main conclusions remain unchanged.

“This is a running summary of where we are,” the official said. “But there is some loose language,” he added, and it was “not ready for publication as an official document.”

Most dramatically, the report says the agency “assesses that Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device” based on highly enriched uranium.

Weapons based on the principle of implosion are considered advanced models compared with the simple gun-type bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima. They use a blast wave from a sphere of conventional explosives to compress a ball of bomb fuel into a supercritical mass, starting the atomic chain reaction and progressing to the fiery blast. Implosion designs, compact by nature, are considered necessary for making nuclear warheads small and powerful enough to fit atop a missile.

The excerpts of the analysis also suggest the Iranians have done a wide array of research and testing to perfect nuclear arms, like making high-voltage detonators, firing test explosives and designing warheads.

The evidence underlying these conclusions is not new – some of it was reported in a confidential presentation to many nations in early 2008 by the agency’s chief inspector, Ollie Heinonen.

Iran maintains that its scientists have never conducted research on how to make a warhead. Iranian officials say any documents to the contrary are fraudulent.

But in August, a public report to the board of the IAEA by its staff concluded that the evidence of Iran’s alleged military activity was probably genuine.

It said “the information contained in that documentation appears to have been derived from multiple sources over different periods of time, appears to be generally consistent, and is sufficiently comprehensive and detailed that it needs to be addressed by Iran with a view to removing the doubts” about the nature of its nuclear program.

The agency’s tentative analysis also says that Iran “most likely” obtained the needed information for designing and building an implosion bomb “from external sources” and then adapted the information to its own needs.

It said nothing specific about the “external sources,” but many intelligence agencies assume that Iran obtained a bomb design from AQ Khan, the rogue Pakistani black marketer who sold Iran machines to enrich uranium. That information may have been supplemented by a Russian nuclear weapons scientist who visited Iran often, investigators say.

NEW DELHI: With recent Chinese incursions creating anxiety in India, national security adviser MK Narayanan has convened a high-level meeting of
top officials on Thursday to formulate an appropriate response to what is widely seen as Beijing’s hostile posturing.

The meeting, to be chaired by Narayanan, is likely to be attended by cabinet secretary KM Chandrasekhar, defense secretary Pradeep Kumar, home secretary GK Pillai and foreign secretary Nirupama Rao.

The chiefs of the three armed forces and the Intelligence Bureau are also expected to attend the meeting which will scrutinies the nature of Chinese incursions and its larger ramifications for bilateral relations.

The meeting comes after reports about a high-profile war game, involving 50,000 troops, launched by the Chinese army that is aimed at improving Beijing’s ability to deploy troops in Tibet whenever reinforcements are required.

In response, the Indian Army has mobilised its troops to forwards posts in Jammu and Kashmir and along the northeastern border with China in an exercise named Operation Alert, a senior defence official said on Wednesday.

Although the government has publicly tried to downplay the incursions as routine incidents that occur due to differences in perception about the Line of Actual Control (LAC), there are anxieties that repeated incursions are meant to signal Beijing’s hardening of stand on the border issue.

It’s a way to put India on the defensive in the boundary negotiations, said a reliable source, who did not wish to be named.

The incursions also come at a time when Beijing has expressed its objection to the proposed visit of Tibetan exiled leader Dalai Lama to Tawang, in India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh which is claimed in its entirety by Beijing.

There was a media report about two Indian soldiers getting injured in firing by Chinese troops in Sikkim recently. But the Indian government denied it.

India and China have held 13 rounds of boundary negotiations which are led by Narayanan and Chinese vice foreign minister Dai Bingguo to resolve the boundary dispute in accordance with political parameters and guiding principles finalised over three years ago. But there has been little progress in talks with both sides reiterating their stated positions.

What has worried the strategic establishment in India is the timing of recent Chinese incursions which follows a string of apparently hostile postures from Beijing over the last year. China tried to block India’s quest for global nuclear trade in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) in September last year, a development that cast a shadow over bilateral ties for some time.

More recently, China tried to block a developmental loan for India at the Manila-based Asian Development Bank on grounds that a part of it was meant for Arunachal Pradesh. Put together, these developments have revived the spectre of China being the principal security threat to India despite rapidly expanding trade and investment between the two countries.

SYDNEY: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on Thursday warned students from India not to take the law into their own hands after writer and activist
Farrukh Dhondy reportedly urged Indians in the country for “some form of retaliation” following the brutal assault on four Indians in Melbourne.

Dhondy has urged Indians in Australia to take matters into their own hands, The Age reported on Thursday.

“There really has to be some form of retaliation from the Indian community as a whole. India has to stand up,” he told ABC Radio.

Rudd said Australia was a law-abiding nation.

“The laws are there for a purpose and that is for all citizens to adhere to them,” he was quoted as saying by The Age.

When asked what message he had for anyone who took the law into their own hands, Rudd said: “People should not”.

The four Indians were attacked by a group outside a bar in Epping on Saturday and the attackers told the victims “You Indians, just go back to your country”.

The attack comes as Victoria’s Premier John Brumby prepares to go on a mission to India to help repair Australia’s reputation.

The victims say they were bashed by up to 70 people in a car park in High Street at Epping on Saturday night.

But the police say there were only four or five offenders, although there were another 15 people making racist comments.

There have been a string of attacks on Indian students since May this year. The attacks have caused an uproar in India.

India’s external affairs minister SM Krishna was assured by Canberra that students from India would be taken care of.

The latest attack takes place after a brief lull in such incidents in which the victims maintain that the assaults were racially motivated.

The brother-in-law of two of the victims, Onkar Singh, had told ABC’s AM programme that his relatives have suffered serious injuries.

“Sukhdip got very badly injured in that, and Gurdeep has his jaw broken, and Mukhtair’s (the uncle) shoulder is broken,” he was quoted as saying.

“When the attack happened there was a lot of people, about 70 and they might have run away or something because they can all see the whole car park was full with them.”